


Tiny Altars Everywhere

by atomicsupervillainess



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fitzsimmons Secret Valentine, Fluff and Smut, a little bit of May never hurt nobody, after trip dies, fsvalentine, moderately fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 19:42:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3353024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atomicsupervillainess/pseuds/atomicsupervillainess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of how Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz find each other again, in those still, small moments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Candle

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic in ages (years and years!) and its a fitzsimmons sectret valentine gift for Agent-Jarvis on the tumblrs, who wanted "Fitzsimmons in any kind of AU setting (Pacific Rim, Harry Potter, etc.) or little drabbles of them living together (setting furniture, going grocery shopping, etc)."
> 
> Now, I feel moderately bad because I didn't really give her either of those things. But there is a grocery store moment! and they do, in fact, live together at the end! Fluffy drabble isn't really my thing - so poor Agent-Jarvis got this instead. 
> 
> I hope you like my little attempt to bring our little science loves back together.
> 
>  
> 
> ~*~

Jemma Simmons was not Catholic.

She was not religious at all, really, but she’d always found herself grouping memories together into little altars – small objects, pictures, journals – on some small unused space on a shelf or on top of a bureau. Like the corner of the Tallboy dresser in her small room in the Playground.

She’d placed the portrait of Agent Peggy Carter that she’d found in the Director’s office on the stained varnish with her old, chipped T.A.R.D.I.S tea cup next to it. Fitz had given it to her years ago, good for nothing now-a-days but holding her loose jewelry – like the earrings her parents had given her at her Academy graduation, and the meteorite necklace Fitz had made for her from the left-over materials of their first project together at SciOps. These tiny devotionals, they held pieces of her, of the things and the people she loved, made sweet and tempered by time, and change, because nothing, she’d realized this past year, her fingertips brushing against the chipped rim of Fitz’s cup, stays the same forever.

Nominally Church of England, her spirituality and her science had, early on, melded somewhere. Her afterlife existed in the first law of thermodynamics. It existed in particles breaking apart and transforming into the nitrogen of soil, feeding plants, living in microbes, exploding across the universe in the brilliant array of a supernova, in the constant spinning recombinant of matter and energy.

 _The problem_ , she thinks, her thumb brushing across the mirrored-frame of Trip’s picture, _is the way one becomes so attached to a particular combination of it all._

It was just a snapshot – just a selfie, snapped in the space of a moment; between missions and paperwork, between the stress of rebuilding and the worry of waiting. They’d found her office – Agent Peggy Carter’s – and they’d crowded around the tarnished door-plaque with her name on it, Trip in the centre, arm extended, taking the photo at an awkward angle, cutting off half of her ear and the wide, pulled corner of her grin. Fitz’s hand was pointing at the plaque, Trip’s arm extended across his shoulders, waving Coulson in just as the flash went off, his face in partial profile, a blur with a smile. The tears in her eyes softened the edges off of all of them, blurring everything together in a wash of colour. She sniffed, wiping away the tears that dropped onto the glass with a cursory brush of her sleeve.

She reached up and moved her leather journal to the side. She angled Fitz’s cup, and slid Trip’s picture into place, her hand tremoring slightly as she let it go. She held still for a long moment, staring at the tableau, trying to will her body to stillness and her mind to task. Trying to compartmentalize all of the things she was feeling, to hold back the grief-tide that was closing over her head like that dark wash of ocean where she’d lost so much already. She squeezed her eyes shut, her lips pulled back in an unpretty grimace, drowning out all of the sounds around her except for the rushing pull of her heartbeat and the struggling breaths that broke through her throat.

She didn’t hear him pad softly around the door of her cramped room, in acquiescence to her grief. He knew, after she’d volunteered to pack Trip’s things for his grandmother, where she’d be. Fitz always knew.

It was instinctual, like a bird flying south for the winter, a fish swimming upstream to its spawning ground, a migratory pattern that had always led straight to her.

He knew she would find some small token of Trip to add to her memory corner, her little altar, up on her dresser. So he had dug under his bed, pulling out the care package from his mum with the devotional candle she’d sent him from St. Simon’s – along with another cardigan she’d picked up from the annual congregational rummage sale. She didn’t have much, his mum, but she gave what she could, and she would be pleased that the votive would get some use.

The hall was empty and quiet, save for the sound of small, short, tear-choked gasps of breath. He would have walked right in, pulled her close, and let her cry, before. She held the world on her shoulders– always doing the hard thing, the right thing – jumping on grenades, out of planes, going undercover at Hydra, always doing what needed to be done for others, so he had done what little he could for her. She was everyone else’s rock. All he could do was prop her up, keep her steady, let her cry, and hold the rest of it at bay when she needed the respite.

But that was before.

The agony in her sobs stilled him in the doorway. Her hand trembled, her little face shuttered in sorrow, eyelashes wet with tears.

She notices him now – notices the red rim of his eyes and how incredibly blue they are, how incisively they see her. They see her in such a broad spectrum of body and soul and self that it’s impossible to hide from those eyes. Impossible not to be seen by them.

She looks up at him. She’s so tiny and vulnerable, tear-stained cheeks and rosebud mouth, an ‘o’ of surprise. He means to give her space, to be respectful of her grief and the distance that’s been between them all this time, but his feet slide forward unconsciously. Before. After. Now. Time is nothing but a construct anyways, he tells himself - _and she’s so small and all alone, and how could I have not have seen how tiny her bones are, before? How little she is, how much smaller she looks, all alone in this small room?_

His arms reach out, unbidden. They are steady and warm when he gathers her up, wreathing around her shoulders and her waist tightly, where she slots in, just so, fits, just like before. Just like always. His hand slides against the flimsy fabric of her blouse, radiating heat as he drags it across her shoulder to tangle in her hair, pulling her cheek closer to the dip in his collarbone. He turns his face slightly, dropping a murmured kiss to the softness of her hair, stroking the crown of her head with infinite tenderness.

His cheek is rough. That’s new. The way she sinks into him? it’s the same as ever.

After a moment, she looks down, sees the candle and the matches. Silently, she smiles up in gratitude, and he hands them to her. She places it in front of Trip’s picture, and with shaky hands, tries to light a match. And then another. Her fingers are trembling so badly, her face a mask of frustrated anguish, that without a word, Fitz takes it from her.

She looks at him pleadingly. His hands are steady, miraculously, for the first time in weeks, and he manages to light the match, to get the candle to flame, flickering reflectively against the picture glass. He drops the matchbook beside it, and pulls her to him again.

He feels her chest rise and stutter back with the depths of her wracking sobs, falling back against his own, and soon, he’s just as bad as she is. Watching her break, watching her splinter into tiny hairline fractures, the tears and vulnerabilities that she rarely lets out, bleeding out onto him, overwhelms him with grief, because he loved Trip too, and he loves her, and how wound-deep this all feels, it’s too much. So they slide down the dresser, tangled in each other. A mess of limbs, all elbows and knees, until they hit the parquet.

They lie like that, and they don’t know for how long. Fitz holding to his chest the million tiny pieces of Jemma that broke in his arms, and her, cradled in the safety of his body – against his chest, bracketed by his thighs, buttressed by his warmth, as slowly, she puts herself together again. It feels like hours. Like days. Like eternity, and maybe it is. _Time is simply a construct, after all,_ she thinks. And she whispers, looking up at him through her lashes, pressed against his wrinkled, checkered shirt, “I miss you. God, I miss you so much Fitz.”

He nods in agreement, his throat too thick to speak. He presses his lips against her temple, and manages, “Me too, Jem.”

Jemma Simmons isn’t religious. She doesn’t believe in God, not really. Not as a comprehensible being, per se. But she believes, in the soft flicker of the votive candle, sunk into the floor and the forgiving confessional of Fitz’s strong arms, listening to the rise and fall chant of his breath, the steady drum of his heart beating under his skin, that if church felt like this, felt like sanctuary, she’d go.


	2. Through the Window

His eyes follow her through the lab window, and he sighs deeply. This is nothing new.

Fitz's eyes have always followed Jemma Simmons. The rest of him too, if he's honest. She's always been a comet, breaking bullet-fast through space, and he's the dust in her wake, at the Academy, at SciOps, onto the Bus. It was their pattern, and for a very long time, he was happy with it. He'd trail behind her in the lab, picking up discarded vials and sanitary plastic wrap because (and you wouldn't know it, because he'd always been there to pick up after her) Simmons was a whirlwind mess. Chitari intestinal fluids? She'd hastily wipe them off her gloved hands, and toss the used tissue towards the bin, always missing it, never concerned. He'd sigh, roll his eyes, and toss it in after her.

He'd follow her with the cart when they went grocery shopping, tossing in candy bars and junk food when her back was turned. At the till, she'd cluck and moan, " _oh Fiiiitz..._ " and raise a single exasperated eyebrow.

In his bunk, in the wee hours, he'd imagine all the other ways he could make her moan ' _oh, Fiiitz_ '. His hand would snake under the covers, tongue darting out of his mouth to lick his lips, eyes squeezing shut and biting his lip at the fantasy of her, the arched length of her spine, the shadowed curve of her breasts, nipples puckering in the chill air. He'd imagine the sharp intake of her breath when his head would dip between the juncture of her thighs, and how her hand would feel, tugging urgently at his curls.

But he wasn't following her now. He was going to the garage with Mack, like he'd promised. He wasn't afraid of being by himself. He'd done that. He wasn't afraid of missing her, because it was inevitable. He would always miss her near. It'd been a week since that day with the candle, and they were still...mending. Tentative. The healing left him irritable, like an itch. He wanted her close, but the distance was a salve. Around her he was like an open wound, his insides clamping painfully at every meaningful glance, desperate to be closer, to to sew them together by their mouths and lips - skin to skin.

On his own, away from her, maybe, by some miracle, he could get over Jemma Simmons. Maybe, he'd cut his own trail, for once. To the naked eye, even a plane can look like a comet, streaking across the night.

He shifts his feet, leaning against the casement, watching her small movements at the centrifuge. It's her area, discarded papers, messy waste-bin - no one else in the lab ballsy enough to countermand the space. And he spots it, there on the shelf behind her, just above her head - the little sock monkey he'd given her just yesterday -

("I couldn't leave you all...by...alone -lonesome - your lonesome," he'd stammered, watching a smile dazzle across her features. "Oh, Fitz. He's lovely." Her eyes caught his, her soft brown doe-eyes, pleased, but sad behind it all, at the confirmation that he was leaving.)

It sat propped up against a bag of pretzels, which Simmons detests, and which he can't get enough of.

He lays his head on the glass, his gaze trailing up the precise movements of her hands, along the long smooth curve of her neck, sketching across her face to her eyes. They are half-lidded, sleepy, smudged purple underneath, like she hasn't slept.

He wishes he didn't have to go in.

"Bus ain't gonna wait all day, Turbo," Mack says offhand as he walks by, before slowing to shoot a glance in the direction of his gaze. "Ahh. Goodbyes are hard, but they've gotta be said." He claps a huge hand against Fitz's shoulder, "You'll be back in a few days, anyways,"

"But it's not just for a few days, is it?" Fitz mutters, "not really..."

So he goes in, hand reflexively at his shoulder. "See you then, Simmons. Be back in a couple of ...d-d," he lets out an aggravated huff of breath. "Soon. Days. In a couple of days."

She nods, plastering on a tight-lipped smile. "I've Little Fitz to keep me company, until you come back," she waves over to the monkey, "which you will - come back, I mean." Her voice cants up an octave, like it’s a question, and her eyes hold his gaze.

It's so tenuous, this thing between them, itching around the edges as they try to knit themselves back together.

"Yeah. Of course. I'll always come back."

Comets, like everything else, orbit. The return may be slow, cyclical, but they come back, nonetheless.


	3. Teacups

The mission was a bust. Hydra had taken the asset, but no one was lost. May had some shrapnel that needed to be take care of, from the scatter-bomb that had given Hydra the advantage, so Fitz went to wake Simmons. It was late in the night - or early in the morning, depending on your perspective, but however you saw it, Simmons should have been asleep.

Alarm shot through him, seeing the unmade, unfilled bed, Simmons no where to be found. He was a lightning rod of worry, his footsteps getting more frantic as he searched, until he was running in and out of the lab and the common rooms, until he came upon her in the kitchen, staring vacantly at the kettle.

He didn’t slow down, barrelling into her and nearly knocking her off her feet as she stumbled, her hands clutching at his tactical gear. In a rush, she let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Her shoulders, which had been sitting high and tense for days, dropped in relief, and she let herself be crushed into the solid mass of his kevlar vest, the fierce pressure of his arms. “You weren’t in your room. I got worried,” He said, by way of explanation.

“I couldn't sleep,” She waved to the kettle, and the newest academic Biochem periodicals strewn beside it.

He watched as she patched May up, slower than normal, bleary-eyed, taking in the deep violet under her eyes, her dark circles like bruises. _Couldn’t sleep. More like ‘haven’t been, at all’_. He thought, handing her gauze and bandages. Under the glare of the fluorescent lights, she looked like a ghost.

Hunter mentioned it first. “That girl does not look well. White as the belly of a fish. Did you see her eyes?”

Bobbi slapped his shoulder. “Hey,” She warned, sitting down beside him on the bench, and then added, after some consideration. “I don’t think she’s been sleeping, exactly. It’s been rough on her, having -” She cut her eyes to where Fitz was watching Simmon’s retreating figure, her slumped, defeated shoulders, and revised, “Having to deal with everything.”

Fitz barely hears. He’s out of the room before Mack can invite him to play _Assassin’s Creed_ in order to come down from the mission adrenalin, even. He’s searching out Simmons.

He finds her back in the kitchen, reading under a lone circle of light. His breath hitches at the sight of her - the way her hair falls against the side her her neck, the tiny glint of her necklace chain in the light, the way her lips curl around the side of her teacup. He takes a deep breath, and marches forward, closing the journal she’s reading authoritatively. “You need to sleep, Simmons.”

She laughs humorlessly. “I know.”

He collects her reading material, and pours himself a cup of tea, before turning back to her. She holds her hands up in defeat, and smiles wryly. “Would that I could.”

With a huff, he goes over, swiping her teacup into his other hand. “We’ll see to that, then,”

She follows behind him, groaning exasperatedly, but too exhausted to put up much of a fight as he kicks open the door to her room, and ushers her to her bed.

“Get in.” He orders, and she can feel heat tingling at her nerve-endings, flushing along her cheeks. His tone tugs low at her belly, and she turns away, hoping he doesn’t catch the sudden flicker of lust that crosses her face. With everything - that’s probably the last thing on his mind. It should be the last thing on hers too, but it seems to be all she can think clearly about, in her sleep-deprived haze - him. being with him. What he said at the bottom of the ocean, what she came so close to admitting to Bobbi, that day, before Trip. Her, wanting something for herself, for once. Wanting him.

“Get in the bed, Jemma,” He orders again, stern-voiced as he sets the teacups on the bedside table. “It’ll be like old times. You’ll be out like a light,” He holds up her tattered copy of _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_.

They settle in, Jemma laying her head on Fitz’s chest, their tea growing cold under the bedside lamp. He reads page after page, and she falls asleep, listening to words tumble out of his mouth, rumbling through his chest like a river over rocks.

When her breathing grows long and shallow, his eyes dipping nearly into sleep, he doesn’t have the energy to extricate himself. If he’s honest, he doesn’t want to. Her hands are balled into tiny fists around his shirt, and her cheek is denting his stomach. She’s cocooned around him, and after the close-call of the mission, he longs for the comfort of it. She’s so peaceful now, her breath escaping in tiny coos.

So Fitz closes the book, places it on the nightstand, beside their discarded teacups, and turns out the light, falling asleep with his arms around Jemma.

It becomes a ritual for them, over the next few days. Stretches into the next mission too - his last one in the garage (Mack understands. His room is three doors down, and his momma didn’t raise no fool). When he returns, he doesn’t bother to knock on the door. Just pads in quietly and slides under the covers. She smiles sleepily and makes room, turning on her side. His arm winds around her, clinging to her shoulder. Fitz presses his face into her hair, and breathes in the scent of her.

The press of his body like this, against the length of her, encompassing her head to toe, settles something deep inside her. Like birds roosting in a nest, she feels home. His breath puffs out hot against her neck, and his knee bumps behind her own, as he lazily snakes his other hand over her, his fingertips resting just inside the waistband of her pajama shorts.

Slowly, their breathing syncs, until Jemma can’t tell who’s breathing in, and who’s breathing out anymore. Fitz? Simmons? _Fitz. Simmons_. _Fitzsimmons_. Who knows where she ends, and he begins, anymore?

She reaches up, one last movement before dropping into dreams, and entwines her fingers through his.


	4. Shot Glass Pyramids

It’s an odd mission, to be sure. A bit screwball, really. There’s supposed to be an asset drop in a stripclub in L.A. - The Landing Strip, or The Hollywood Strip, something punny and awful, Fitz thinks, plunking down another obligatory shot-glass. It’s not supposed to be vodka, but the danger rating is low, Skye’s nervous (it’s her first time back in the field since Trip, and she’s never actually waitressed, even though that’s her cover here), and Coulson isn’t really paying attention to the drinks.

“They’re totally macking, aren’t they?” He nudged Fitz in the shoulder, and tilted his head in Hunter’s direction - He was in the middle of a very thorough lap dance. Bobbi was glaring daggers at him as she spun from the chrome pole on stage, her leg bent at an ungodly angle. “Macking? Is that right? That’s what the kids say now a-days, right?”

“ _Eww_.” Skye shivered as she pocketed a twenty, “Please, don’t ever say that again. But, yeah - _obviously_.”

Fitz, silent through this exchange, watched as Hunter signaled to Mack, “Come on, mate. This hard-working co-ed needs to put herself through school. More ones! Or don’t you believe in higher education?”

“You’re a dog,” Mack chuckled, looking back at Fitz and shaking his head comically.

Fitz gave an awkward half-smile back, and went back to stacking the shot-glasses like a card pyramid. He’s got a surprisingly high alcohol tolerance, which means, even after five shots, a beer or two, and three hours, the only thing he felt right then was thoroughly uncomfortable. The scary buffet to the right of him didn’t help, neon heat-lamps barely hot enough to keep the nacho cheese from congealing. His part of the mission was basically done - it was up to Bobbi now. He emptied out another packet of sugar into the terribly weak tea Skye brought him, and tapped his hands on the table nervously, trying to figure out where to look. It seemed, well, indecorous, to watch the dancers disrobe, but alternately, disrespectful, not to.

One of the new dancers on stage (It was a very sapphic duo, with some very suggestive touching) caught his eye, and looked down at his tapping hands disapprovingly. Quickly, he shoved them in his pockets, and shifted his gaze. It fell on a red faced, portly fellow two tables left, whose hands were also in his pockets, moving quickly and obscenely as he tried to keep his...activities...unnoticed.

Fitz quickly pulled his hands up, and laid them palm down on the table, rattling the shot-glass pyramid. What he wouldn’t give for Simmons at this moment. She’d make generous remarks about the costuming, and sly, cutting ones about the patrons, and then fall into a lecture about individual muscle structures and the athleticism pole dancers needed, and how that alone deserved some serious consideration.

If she was drunk enough, her competitive drive would shift into gear, and she’d tilt her head, watching their movements, before declaring. “I could do that. I could.” and then he’d spend half an hour alternately appeasing her, hauling her away from the stage, and thinking of what he’d give to actually see her try it.

The thought made him smile shyly, to himself, pink clouding against his neck, curling in, flushed against his ears and cheeks. He’d caught glimpses of her, in the moonlit dark, between the sheets as he slid in. She’d taken to wearing just her soft cotton panties and her old Academy t-shirt, and nothing else, so the image in his mind was, schematically - accurate. the wide, tulip-flair of her hips, and her round, pert bum - he could happily replay the frames that streamed in his mind, over and over. _Her milky-white thighs_ ….

He felt himself start to harden at the thought, and tried to will it away. That wouldn’t do. Things were getting better. They were different than they had been, but they were Fitzsimmons again, and after so long missing her, being without her, he didn’t want to lose it by projecting his desires onto her. They hadn’t ever spoken of it again - she never brought it up, _politely skirting the issue_ , he’d thought, trying to keep them platonic, like they had been, _like they should be_ , he reminded himself, groaning as he re-adjusted himself discreetly in his pants, trying not to picture the swell of her bare hip peeking out from the side of her pink panties and the swath of her t-shirt.He swiftly replaced his palms on the table-top, hoping no one had seen.

Hydra had been circulating Jemma’s picture again, so now she was laying low, back on base, while he was here, flustered and uncomfortable, and entirely out of his depth, terrified of his hands - or, more correctly, not knowing what to do with them.

Skye circled the table again, dropping change in exchange for the tracker pin she’d slip in Bobbi’s robe in a minute, and said, “You look about ready to keel over or puke. What’s your deal, man?”

Fitz held up his betraying hands. “I’m unsure of what to do with these. I can’t put them in my pockets. If I put them on the table I start tapping, ‘cause of my nerves, but then the...dancing ladies -”

“They’re strippers Fitz. You can call them strippers.”

“The ladies, they glare at me because they think I’m bored, and I’m not! It’s an athletic marvel - but it’s an awkward one…”

“ _You’re_ an awkward one,” Skye grinned sarcastically, tossing him his mobile. “Play with your phone. Call someone. Play the super-dopey boyfriend who can’t go to the ‘rippers without thinking about his girl. That’s always sweet,”

He made a face at her, and she sidled off into the back, going to make the secondary drop. fifteen minutes later, he found himself, absently, hitting Simmons number.

“Hello, Fitz,” She said brightly, “This is a surprise - mission done early?”

“Oh. No. Still going on.”

“Oh.” A pause. Then, alarmed, she asked, “ _Is everything alright?_ ”

“Everything but my hands,” He said, nodding. Perhaps those shots were hitting him after all, he thought, twisting his head, his vision lagging a half-second behind the movement.

“ _Tremors? Soreness? Pain? What are your symptoms?_ ” Worry tinged her voice.

“No, no, they’re medically fine, but, I don’t know what to do with them, Jem!” He declared, louder than he intended. He dropped his voice to a low whisper, his natural glasgow burr rumbling an octave down, “I don’t know where to put my hands, Jem - or what to do with them. So I called you…”

“Oh,” She sat back, her weight hitting the lab bench hard as her brain raced, synapses firing with ideas of just where he could put his hands, and what he could do with those long, fine fingers of his. "Oh," she said again.

She thought back to the night previous. The last few nights. How he'd taken to draping his hand across her hips, splaying low across her abdomen, the firm pads of his fingers resting snug just inside the waistband of her panties. A delicious shiver trilled up her spine. It was so teasing - that unspoken line between where they were and where they could be. But that was the thing - they never spoke on it. Not yet. But they pushed at it.

Or at least, she did.

Last night, she'd turned, tilting her hips ever so slightly, willing with all the powers of her mind, that those long fingers, so precise and delicate with tools and lab equipment - would just, carelessly, slip - dip beneath the waistband, skirt along the jut of her hipbone, and then...

Jemma ran a hand along her collarbone, coming to clutch her meteorite necklace, unconsciously. She had wanted those long, warm hands to move. Maybe tentative at first, but then, confident. His palm pressing against her mons like a brand, searing her as his fingers stroked along her seam, slow, agonizingly slow, the pressure increasing, getting deeper, until his fingers - those perfect, masterful fingers, entered her, found her center, and staked a claim.

Her breath escaped in an airy, needy sigh over the phone.

"Jem? You alright? What was that?"

They hadn't of course. Fitz was a gentleman. Even though his hand hadn't slipped like she'd wanted, to give her what she was desperate for, they'd tightened on the skin of her belly, not moving. He'd, sleepily released a growled exhale, and unconsciously pressed closer. She could feel the hard length of him pressing firmly into the curve of her ass, and fought the rising urge to grind against it - so desirous for that delectable friction, like a cat in heat.

"Yes. Yes. Your hands...what a conundrum," she added, absently licking her lips.

She fantasized about him coming up behind her in her ensuite bathroom while she divested herself of her clothes. He’d pull her hair from her neck, and plant hot, wet, open mouthed kisses against the juncture of her jaw and throat, trailing like fire down to the dip of her collar bone, the soft feather-touch of his fingers against her shoulders and ribs, just burning her up.

She clenched her thighs together on the bench, her eyes fluttering closed at the fantasy. His hand sliding possessively under the strap of her bra, freeing her breast, his fingers roaming over her, thumb tweaking her nipple, swiping the sensitive mound, electric across her nerve endings. Fitz's mouth, that beautiful strawberry mouth, moving just below her shoulder, just on the upper reaches of her chest, still so far away from where she needed it.

He’d press himself against her then, and finally, she’d give in, rolling her hips up against the length and girth of his cock. With a growl deep in his throat and a wolfish grin at her in the mirror, he’d push her against the sink aggressively. His hands would dig painfully into her hips, maybe leave bruises for her to admire in the morning. Sinking his teeth into the tender spot at the nape of her neck, all sharp, hard, penetrating points, he’d pull back, laving the spot with the moist flat of his tongue as he pulled her up onto her tip-toes, one hand reaching forward decisively, his fingers pressing into the seam of her jeans, just right there - just where it counted. He’d lean forward, trapping her against him, the pressure mounting, and she’d cry out - overwhelmed with sensation -

“- are you even listening to me, Simmons?”

She stuttered out a breath, broken from her heated fantasy, and embarrassingly, fanned herself for a moment in the lab. “I’m sorry Fitz - it’s getting late, I’m just bushed,”

“Well then I won’t keep you,” He sighed into the receiver, emptying out a sugar packet onto the tabletop, and then another, tipsily running his finger through it. He dropped his voice and whispered, “I’ll go to mine tonight, yeah? I’d hate to wake you. You look so peaceful sleeping, Jem.”

“Oh,”

She was surprised. Had he said too much? Had he stepped over the line, that invisible line they never talked about, that they didn’t mention? That serrated the space between them? Shit. He’d fucked up. Again.

“I just - you sound tired, and I’m a mite tipsy,”

“...If that’s what you want, I guess - I suppose - I mean -” Jemma shook her head, chiding herself softly in her mind, running a frustrated hand through her hair, “Of course. If that’s what you’d prefer,”

Fitz finishes his childish sugar painting, and pushes away from the table, getting some distance from Coulson and the rest of the team, “That’s not - I mean, what would _you_ prefer?” He slurs.

He’s drunk. She can tell. Probably shots. Vodka, at her best guess. He always overestimates his tolerance for vodka, so she thinks, educated hypothesis, he probably won’t remember the particulars of this conversation tomorrow. She inhales a big, brave breath, and exhales, “You, Fitz. I’d prefer you, with me.” _Forever_ , she doesn’t add, but it echoes in her brain and her heart. But she’s not that brave.

“Okay. Okay.” He repeats, a dopey grin hanging, “Alright.” Coulson catches his attention, motioning with a tilt of his head to the neon exit sign. “See you in a few hours then.”

Hastily, he grabs his coat off the seatback, not even looking back at the doodled _‘LF <3 JS' _he’d drawn on the table, the neon lights refracting through the shot glass pyramid, prisming a rainbow through the scrawl.

When he tumbles into the sheets next to her, clumsy as a saint bernard puppy, his hand skimming her breast, his mouth against her ear, softly puffing out air, she thinks she could get used to this. He snuggles in closer, laying half on top of her, his haphazardly-thrown leg digging a well between her thighs, heavy with liquor and sleep.

She thinks she hears him mutter, “ _G’night, babygirl,_ ” against her cheek.

The smell of alcohol is sweet on his breath as he pulls her in tighter. His body is like a furnace, and she kicks off the comforter, wrapping her arms tiredly around the curl of his back, blanketing herself in him instead.


	5. The Books

There were suddenly books everywhere, Fitz noticed, early, before dawn. Piles of them, just multiplying, like some sort of paper-bound bacteria.

He pulls his wrinkled pants off of Jemma’s floor in the dark, and flicks his eyes to their spines, trying to read their titles. He doesn’t have long. It’s almost five, which means May and Skye will be up soon, at this ungodly hour, and this - arrangement - or whatever it is, between him and Jemma, would be terribly hard to explain - so he can only skim across a few, briefly - _The Poetry of John Donne_ , Pablo Neruda, _Pride and Prejudice_ , _Letters and Correspondences of Affection_ , _An Anthology of Verse_ , _The Collected Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ \-  before slipping out the door.

Fitz, poor thing, grumpy and confused and tired, stumbling back to his room in sock-feet for a change of clothes and an hour’s lie-down, doesn’t know that Mack has seen them, curled foetal together, like yin-yang halves.

Fitz doesn’t know that Bobbi and Hunter have been giggling like freshmen, gossiping about the way he and Jemma orbit each other, their inevitable gravitational pull, when they crash into each other in the lab, profuse, blushing apologies stammering off their tongues.

He hasn’t seen Coulson’s benign smile as he peeks into the lab, watching Jemma rest a hand on Fitz’s shoulder, and then, after a moment, her forehead.

The Koenig brothers even have a betting pool about how far the two of them have gone. Billy thinks they’re secretly engaged, while Sam’s pretty sure they’re just fucking. May’s winning, of course, even though she’s had to clarify - twice - that when she says ‘sleeping together’, that’s what she means. She’s even had to add the addendum: ‘not yet kissed’.

Skye just looks at them, wistful and nostalgic, wishing for things she can’t even conceive of for herself, these days. It makes her feel an odd, happy-sad deep in her chest.

For all that they work for a secret espionage organization, Fitzsimmons are terribly bad at sneaking around.

In the lab, he’d spied more volumes - _The Physiology of Emotion_ and something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It stumps him completely, sends him tunnelling in his mind, turning the screws to it all - just what had gotten into his Jemma, these days, that she was suddenly so invested in Latin American magical realism? And poetry?

He backed into her, suddenly, and she skittered away like the opposite pole of a magnet, a startled flush rising on her cheeks.

What was next? Virginia Woolf and the Beat poets, while she ricocheted as far away from him as she could? He didn’t understand it - one minute, everything was beautiful and perfect and they were so in tune, so synced up - better than ever before, just connected, and then, suddenly, she’d pull back, bolt upright, startled eyes deer-wide, breath catching, chest hitching, looking all stricken and fearful and maybe - he couldn’t be sure, but, maybe? _Excited_? But then she’d shuttle to the other side of the lab, or the kitchen, or the couch, so far away from him.

It killed him. And it thrilled him, strangely. Maybe he was a masochist, maybe his treacherous heart had co-opted his body, against his better judgement. But there was something about the way her dark eyes lit up, how her wide mouth hollowed into a tiny bow of surprise, the way her skin reacted when he brushed against her, ever so - bumping up in a wave of goose-flesh.

He couldn’t help himself. He honed in on her, striding forward to where she struggled, on tip-toes reaching for a beaker on the top shelf, her fingers barely brushing the sides of it. Fitz flicked his tongue out quickly, moistening his lips.

He wanted to see it. Wanted to watch the rose-tint cloud up the back of her neck, to see her shiver when his hand accidentally-on-purpose grazed her ribs.

He invaded her space, pressing up close behind her. She inhaled sharply, but didn’t move. A tendril of a grin curled the corner of his lips, knowingly. One hand wound gently against her hip, pulling her back, away from the beaker, manipulating the curve of her bum against his thigh, slightly. He felt her shiver sumptuously under the trail of his fingertips as they brushed against the sides of her ribs, the underside of her bicep, skimming against her forearm as he pulled it down for her.

“careful Simmons,” He murmurs. his tone is something more than playful, his eyes dark and hooded when they catch hers, the curling half-smile still hanging on the corner of his lips, “You’re a right danger in this lab,”

Her cheeks blossom, pink spilling across her cheekbones and against her ears at his flirtation. She flicks her eyes down, momentarily, a flash of a startled smile, and then, she, challengingly, meets his gaze, and grins, wicked and slow. “The only danger in this lab, Leopold Fitz, is you,” She says, poking him in the chest.

Her hips brush tantalizingly against him as she slides past, titterring to herself.

“Low blow, Simmons!” He shouts at her back, rubbing the spot she’d poked and grinning to beat the band, “Only my mum calls me Leopold!”

 


	6. The Fire Door

Fitz hadn't got better. Not exactly.

Long days and nights tinkering with gadgetry cramped up his hand and made his arm sore and tired. Simmons, under the guise of her doctorate of biology, would take his hand in hers, running strong thumbs against the joints and muscle groups, easing the knots and tension that had built up in his hand and forearm.

"Medical massage. It helps. " she would say, trying to keep her voice even and her mind from lingering on thoughts of his hands. She'd stroke the long stretch of muscle in his forearm, pushing the tension from it, and unconsciously bite her lip.

"It's good for releasing things." She was a doctor - well, she had doctorates. She knew what she was about, his Jemma, Fitz thought, feeling his heart unravel in his chest as he watched her, busy about her task, her hair falling like a curtain against her cheek.  

He longed to reach out a hand and push those loose tendrils behind her ear. To whisper in the tight silence that bound them, _I love you. I think i've never not loved you. Before I was born, it was in me, like a seed. I can't stop admiring how unbelievably clever you are, and thinking about your smile, and the smell of your hair, and the scent of your skin, just under your shoulder when I wake up._

He wants to unleash the jumble of words that crowd in his throat as her deft fingers work.

 _I'll always come back to you._ He muses in his mind. _Always find you. I think, somewhere in that first burst of stars, my atoms got twisted up in yours, and they've never stopped being twisted up in all of those minute particles of you._

He leans closer, their foreheads nearly touching, and lets his loose hand play along the side of her hip in that torturous, tempting game, skirting the words.

Fitz doesn't think love is a strong enough word, or a big enough one for the way he feels about her. But he's not really good with words anymore. His hypoxia still stilts his speech sometimes, when he's tired, or stressed,  or anxious. Usually, at those times, Simmons speaks for him instead. But these are words she can't say for him. He doesn't know if she ever will. It's been a month - nearly two. He's begun to keep some clothes in her room, portion off half of the Tallboy dresser for his engineering manuals, his ipod speakers and his signed picture of David Tennant and Matt Smith.

For all intents and purposes, they are more intimate than they've ever been, except they don't peck each other absently on the cheek anymore. Their touches aren't incidental, or friendly.

When they touch, its purposeful. They are so aware - they know, each time they reach for each other, how tightly they spin around that star. How close they are to clinging to the fire, to pressing their lips against each other in a hasty clash of tongues and teeth and mouths.

God, he wants to kiss her. To taste her on his tongue. He longs for it like a memory he doesn't yet have.

"Jem, I - well, I mean to say that, um, _ahh.._." he trails off, grimacing in frustration. He jutters up and down in his chair, trying to shake the words free from his brain, but he just appears impatient and displeased.

"I'm sorry, i know, you've your work." She flicks her gaze up, pushes her hair behind her ears, and nods, shoving her chair back suddenly. "I just, thought it might - help, or something." She pivots and starts tidying things at random, her back turned from him, trying to hide a frustrated growl.

" _Of course not_ ," he hears her mutter in aggravation as she leaves the lab, clutching files to her chest.

No, Leo Fitz was not good with words, anymore.

But Jemma Simmons has never been good at saying things. Not real things. Things that were sharp and heavy and had weight when they dropped off the tongue and into the world. She could blame her upbringing, but what was the use? So Jemma had done what she always did in situations like these. She had studied.

She had read about the psychology and physiology of emotions, the biology of love, the history of it as it spanned through the ages - political marriages to the balladry of middle ages romantic love, thumbed through the greatest love affairs of fiction, and even taken notes from the love letters of great personages.

She had studied poetry and the mechanics of metaphor, trying to learn the right syntax and lexicon of the heart, the verbiage of love and desire, of lust and need and all of it, hoping, when the moment came, she could be ready to say the words.

And it had to be her to say it, this time. She knew. He'd given everything, he'd been ready to die there, at the bottom of the ocean. And he'd come back to her, after so much had pushed them apart, to become part of her again, without expectation or pushing - and maybe, she thought, rapidly, anxiously, that was it - after everything they'd been through together, after all she tried to say without speaking, maybe he had gotten over her after all. Maybe he didn't spend the same hours dreaming about her as she did him.

But then, why all of the new flirtation, why touch her the way he did? Did she just want it so much that she was seeing attraction where there was none?

The risk of it terrified her. Of saying the hidden things in her heart, the down deep, true things, the things that were so big and encompassing that her mind couldn't guess at the shape of them, before everything.

Jemma is flustered and panicked at the enormity of her feelings for Fitz. She stalks down the halls and up the stairwell, flight after flight, trying for some reason, to find some space - all of her anxieties and emotions are so close to her, so stacked up on top of her. She has to get somewhere she can spread it all out, and calmly, package it away, back in the heart-shaped box it had lived in, before Ward and the ocean, Before Hydra and Trip, before Fitz's arms became her pillow, and his mouth her beacon home.

Jemma drops her files and throws open the fire-door. The stairwell is too cramped, and there's just not enough room there for all of her feelings, and she just screams wordlessly across the abandoned industrial park, anguished and frustrated, her hands coming to clutch at her hair, just vibrating angrily.

There's no way it'll fit back inside her, the love she feels for Fitz. It was like a tumor, growing and growing, and now its expanded past its confines - gotten too big for her, alone.

She's been all rearranged. Organs displaced. It's just Fitz now. She used to think about herself sometimes, but now, its thoughts of Fitz that fill up the empty space.

She throws her hands up and groans in defeat, slapping her palms to the iron wrought railing.

The fire-door swings open, and she turns, half-startled, half expectant. Her eyes are glassy, and her face reddens, impotent and embarrassed in the face of her feelings.

Fitz stares back at her, rooted to the concrete, his body swaying as he halts.

"Its just useless." She declares, pleading and defeated, and begging for something, somehow.

Two strides find him against her, pushed back along the railing. His hands tangle in her lab coat, pulling her flush against him. He drags his eyes from her petal-pink mouth to her startled, begging eyes, dark pools of want, begging him to drown in her.

For the smallest of moments, he stills. Her breath eddies against the skin of his throat, and like a tide, he is pulled to the pink shoals of her lips. His mouth breaks against hers, and she gasps, fisting her hands into his jumper, pulling at the small of his back, dragging him closer.

His tongue flickers at the seam of her lips, and they part. He is slow, testing, as her moist tongue meets his. At that permission, he surges forward, fingers trailing over her scalp, tongue diving, pelvis grinding up into hers.

She moans, grasping at different parts of him, trying to touch all of him at once - back, shoulder, that firm, perfect ass, the sweep of his jaw. It works under her palm as they shift, breathing hard, sinking back into each other with abandon.

Fitz's hand is hot against the back of her neck as he tilts her head up, angling it to pepper her jaw with the tenderest of kisses, until he's licking and sucking at the skin just beneath her earlobe, making her shudder all over.

 _How did he get so good at this?_ She wonders as keening, needy noises rise from her throat. Her hand is splayed over his chest, the insistent drum reminding her that this is real, not some vivid dream.

Her other hand has taken up residence in his curls, combing and clutching, and he tries to get closer still, leaning her half-over the railing. If he were a ship, he'd wreck himself against her, right here.

Her hand moves again, this time to skim under his shirt, feather-soft against his ribs, and something - some sound he's never made before, halfway between a growl and a gasp, escapes his chest.

His own hand slides between the railing, cupping her ass.

"Oh shit," a voice barks behind them.

"You are definitely not Bobbi. Either of you." Hunter clears his throat. "Well, soldier on, then,"

Their hands have dropped, they've broken apart, propelled away from each other at the intrusion. Jemma bolts. Her footsteps clatter up from the stairwell, leaving both men bewildered and confused.

"I'm always interrupting things," Hunter says, by way of an apology, as Fitz rushes past him.

 


	7. Jemma's Letter

Fitz stares down after the sound of Jemma’s retreat, having nearly tripped at the pile of books and papers and folders she’d dropped haphazardly by the fire-door. He gathers them up, tapping the stack on the bottom to line everything up neatly - and it’s not that he’s OCD, he just prefers symmetry, and what on earth -

> ~~Dear Leo. Dearest Fitz. My Darling Leopold~~.   
>  My Dearest Fitz,
> 
> ~~I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing this letter because~~ It is not easy for me to write a letter like this. between us, the expressive one has always been you, Fitz. ~~You snap and you rail and you rage and you speak and curse and demand~~ \- in the past, it was always enough. The things I felt, you felt them too, so when you spoke a ~~nd cursed and snapped, throwing things and shouting~~ , you did so for the both of us.
> 
> I’ve never been comfortable ~~making a spectacle of my vulnerability - being vulnerable -~~ being open about my feelings. ~~This pen might as well be a scalpel, the ink might as well be blood, and this letter, well, it might as well be my chest, ribs cracked open down the center, my london-red heart beating on the page, for how exposed I feel.~~
> 
> I suppose after such a preamble as that, I should simply say it. I never dreamed you would feel the same way for me as I did for you. I tried to love you less, but I couldn’t. ~~I feel as though it was germinating, miles under the soil, rooting itself around my organs in tiny shoots, learning, by osmosis, it seems, how to love you. My heart bloomed quietly in those perfect, small moments with you, when you were mine, and no one else’s. I~~ n the academy, you fell in love every week, sudden and fast, and I would sit outside the whirlwind, and wait for it to pass. I thought - when we arrived on the Bus, and you were so taken with Skye, that I should let that dream fade. Our partnership was so much more important, after all, than a moment’s passion, and what would become of us, if it all simply fizzled out?

Fitz thunked into the cement stair, utterly flabbergasted, blinking at the many-folded page in his hand. Torn from some notebook, the letter was written in varying colours of ball-point pen. Some words were light, barely visible, as if she was too afraid to let those thoughts linger, while other lines, deep and embedded, were unable to fight the way they imprinted on the page.

She had crossed out almost half of the words, second-guessed herself, trying to be clear without being voluble, honest without being vulnerable.

“Oh Jemma, oh my poor lass,” Fitz idled over those hastily struck-through phrases, his heart thumping in his chest like an echo-chamber, radiating out through his limbs. “Oh babygirl,” he crooned into the page, reading on.

> ~~I promise, I tried not to love you. But my curiosity got the better of me. I'd watch your dextrous, sure hands in the lab, tinkering with delicate instruments, crafting something beautiful and dangerous, and would find myself wondering what those hands would make out of me - what beautiful, dangerous thing they would engineer from my flesh?~~

Fitz exhaled harshly. An excited shudder quaked through him.

“You’re _still_ here?” Hunter questioned, a baffled expression on his face, “Honestly, whatever for? You could get a sh-”

“Get out, Hunter!” Fitz blasted, glaring balefully at his retreat, his face flushed red. Unconsciously, he brought his hand up to his shoulder, missing her presence, reading her words.

> So, I threw myself into my work, more so than usual even, so much that I didn’t notice when the way you looked at me began to change. I cannot pinpoint the moment. I was so blindsided, Fitz, ~~my darling Fitz, when you sacrificed yourself, and the guilt I felt, the way you struggled so much worse around me, I knew, though it hurt, I needed to leave you, to protect you, to help you heal.~~  I know our circumstances have changed, since you said so much ~~\- did so much for me, there at the bottom of the sea~~ , and I know your feelings have probably changed after everything that has passed between us, and that you have probably moved on. But I want you to know, ~~I need you to know~~ , that no matter your feelings or the things that have happened, these last few months, I could not have survived them without you.

It hurt, it physically hurt, the way his insides clenched - they’d never talked about it really, because Jemma, well, she was never one for talking. And in that, their time apart, he’d always held her responsible, and the one time she tried to tell him, the one time - “I never knew...God, I’m a selfish wanker,” he muttered to himself.

His eyes grew glassy; the words swam on the page. He blinked, and sniffled. As he read, he could hear her voice inside his mind.

> There are nights I wake up, gasping for air in the dark, afraid I’ve lost you in the pull of the tide, but you are always there. Your chest rises and falls. Your arms are soft, and the weight of you against me anchors me in the present. It’s all I can care about, in those moments after the nightmares pass - that you are here, that you are safe, that you are alive. When I find myself yearning for more, I look at you in sleep, and wonder, ‘what more could I ask for?’

How had he been so utterly blind? How could he not have seen the toll it took on her? How could he not have known that the guilt she shouldered wasn’t just for Trip, or her regret, but that it was trauma, real trauma - She was just so damnably stubborn, that fool girl, taking on so much, never saying a word, trying never to be a burden, trying to keep that upper lip so bloody stiff -

> You spend so much of your waking life, these days, cursing your bad luck and worrying about being damaged, being too broken to keep up, that you fail to see how you’ve healed, how far you’ve come.
> 
> You are almost there. ~~But you are already so much more beautiful to me.~~
> 
> You don’t see how your heroism has marked you, you don’t see the beauty it’s given you in your scars and struggles. You don’t see how little the tremors and the stutters matter to me, because to me, they don’t signify you as some poor, broken thing, like you view yourself - to me, they delineate the path of your survival, the map of your bravery ~~\- they are the bruise left over when the universe kissed you and granted respite, letting you remain with me for just a little longer.~~ I shall never be able to tell you enough, what you are for me, what you mean to me, and how very, very important you are to me.

Fitz’s breathing had gone shuddery, somewhere in those passages. his shirtsleeves had gotten sodden from wiping at his eyes. His heart swelled inside his chest, his lips pressing into a tiny, tight, emotional smile, as he reread the paragraphs, trying to see himself as she saw him, as someone heroic. Someone important.

The spaces in the next paragraph were tight between the words, as if her pen could not contain the ink, couldn’t spill it out fast enough - like somewhere, a dam had broken inside her, and this was the deluge.

> Someday, I want to wake up next to you. Not next to the cooling sheets where you have been, the dent in the pillow that smells of your shampoo. I want to roll over and wake you up with a thousand kisses, whispering the endless ways that I love you. A hundred-thousand handwritten love letters could not contain it, nor a million.
> 
> I love the way your hair licks up into curls. I love the way you move your strong, slender hands. I love the way your mouth smiles so quickly. I love the way your voice deepens when you get stern. I love the way you work, so single-minded and brow-furrowed, the whole world slipping away around you. I admire the way your brain quickens and the spark that fires in your eyes. I marvel at the elegance of your equations, the persistence of your mind, the dedication of your heart, the tenderness of your soul, the sheer, lionhearted courage you unfailingly show.
> 
> I love you.
> 
> I love you. I love you. I love you.
> 
> If the ever-expanding universe were made of nothing but scrawled 'I love you's', it could never be big enough, inked enough, graffitied enough for the likes of me. It's like a kind of madness.
> 
> I am no poet. I cannot fathom the art, the metaphor. I am too much the scientist. But ~~my admiration,~~ my desire for you, turns me into something like.
> 
> I want to write sonnets on the skin of your back with my finger-nails. I long to speak couplets against your body with my lips, to murmur tiny odes of adoration, "Oh Fitz, oh Fitz, oh my dearest, darling Fitz, how i love you."
> 
> Yours, ~~always yours~~ if you'll have me,
> 
> Jemma.

“Right,” Fitz mutters, clammering to his feet, Jemma’s letter crushed into his palm, taking the steps two at a time.

Jemma is pacing in her room when he finds her. She sketches a quick glance up, sees his nearly empty hands, and let out a sigh of relief, “I’ll just - My reports -” She tries to avoid his gaze as she makes a motion for the door.

“ _Jemma…_ ” Fitz’s voice is thick with emotion.

Suddenly, she sees it. Like watercolour paint, a pink hue colours the skin of her throat, her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. Hesitantly, her eyes meet his.

“ _Oh no_ ,” She breathes, backing up, gulping in air, like there’s not enough between them, the backs of her knees hitting the hard edge of her bed.

Fitz watches, stunned, as she collapses into sitting, her limbs ragdolling, watches as her mind spins. “It wasn’t ready. I wasn’t - it was just a draft,” She squeaks out, turning away, wiping hastily at her face. “It’s okay if you don’t - it’s completely understandable, with everything, if you’re not -” She clears her throat, trying to hide a tiny hiccough. “You weren’t supposed to see it, and I -”

He walks slowly, scared she’ll spook, shy away like a startled horse, but he needs to be beside her.

“I can’t lose you again,” She whisper-sobs, pressing her hands to her mouth, holding it closed against the words that want to tumble out of it, that want to spill themselves at his feet. She fights the inexorable pull to look at him. What if he doesn’t want her? What if it was a fluke, on the fire escape?

Fitz kneels in front of her, so close he can see her shake from the force of the emotions she’s been holding in. His hands reach out to comfort her, the gesture so second-nature, so innate between them, he doesn’t think twice. His thumbs brush the inside of her knees, his fingers squeezing at the juncture of her calves. “Oh Jemma, oh my darling Jem. Babygirl, it would be impossible for me not to love you,”

He tilts his head, craning to catch her teary gaze. He slides his right hand up her side, carefully, a whisper of a touch, to dwell against her cheekbone, stroking the tear trail. Angling her face tenderly towards his face, he presses her forehead to his.

Her eyes flutter closed, her lashes fan against her cheeks. “Not just in a friends way?” She implores.

Her tone fractures something inside him. He leans forward, the tip of his nose skimming the bridge of hers. his mouth seeks her lips, like he is on a pilgrimage, and she is Mecca.

And she is. He decides, as he arches into her, she is his holy place. She is where all roads converge. She is where he, quite literally, kneels, he thinks, slipping closer as her jean-clad knees part to make way for him.

He splays his hand across the span of her low back. Her lips are petal-soft, the tip of her tongue runs tentatively against his, and he sucks in an aching, needy gasp. He could pray vigil here, at her feet, against her mouth, burning with the heat of her skin.

Fitz’s lips are warm and dry and insistent against her own. There is something momentous and necessary about this, the urgent way his mouth surges up against hers, and it is such a loss, such a devastation, when he pulls away, briefly, that her lips stumble forward, seeking his.

“Not just friends,” he murmurs, “More. Always was,” before pressing forward and capturing her mouth again, dauntless.

Jemma’s heart shimmy-shakes between her ribs. a breathy sigh escapes her throat when his hands begin to roam, wanderingly, against the exposed skin between her blouse and the top of her jeans.

She shudders needfully in his hands. He kisses her clamorously, rising up from his knees, bending over her as he stands. They are connected at the mouth. Two organisms, symbiotic, unable to stop touching.

She wants more of him - more of him against every inch of her, she thinks, hooking her heels against the backs of his thighs as he eases her down onto the mattress. They idle here, and Jemma utters a sigh, memorizing the way his chest kneads her breasts when they shift, when his weight drops halfway onto her, the scent of him filling her nose. Fitz cants his hips upwards, into the groove of her pelvis, the delicious friction drawing out needy, keening sounds from both of them.

“Oh!” She cries, all of a sudden, as he does it again, grinding so deeply and confidently, and she can’t believe how wantonly her back arches, how her hips rise, thrusting herself against him, against the press of that seam in her jeans - “Fitz!” she barely recognizes her voice, the tremulous, breathy quality to it, as her muscles strain against him. He palms the globes of her ass, pulling her impossibly close as he grinds the bulge in his crotch up inexorably against her centre - third time’s the charm, he thinks as she cries, “ _Oh, Fiiitz!_ ”

A wolfish grin parts his lips as he swallows Jemma’s desperate moan with a deep, plundering kiss. He’s always been a quick study, and in this, he is no exception, she thinks, her hands digging into the collar of his shirt, pulling him closer.

Her heels are wound tightly around his thighs, her hands drag up the hemispheres of his back, trying desperately to feel the heat of him under her palms, radiating like a furnace, but she can’t seem to untuck his shirt fast enough. Frustratedly, she mewls, “Too many - “

“Clothes,” He finishes.

Together, they sit up, still entangled. Their eyes are bright and their lips are crushed red, pillowy with kisses. Jemma slides forward on his lap, bumping into Fitz’s chest as they find balance - they laugh, something like surprise and relief filling the air around them. Her hands are working themselves into the hem of his shirt, and throwing her head back, she giggles, “I can’t believe this is happening,”

Jemma pushes at the fabric of his jumper as Fitz struggles to unhitch the buttons near his neck. “That’s it, I’m inventing a velcro shirt,” He grunts, fingers slipping.

Jemma dips her head, like a hummingbird, lightly and quickly brushing her lips against his, and grins, “Let me,”

“O-okay,” Fitz bumbles, taken aback and suddenly nervous - what does he do with his hands?

He watches her face. Watches as tendrils of her unkempt hair fall forward artlessly, impeding her intent, focused gaze. Tentatively, he reaches out a shaking hand, his nerves attacking, and he berates himself silently, hoping she doesn’t notice, willing himself not to care, as his thumb caresses her temple, lovingly pushing the strands behind her ear.

As she looses one button, her tongue slips against her lips, and his stomach flip-flops. The sheer, emboldened desire in her face - pupils blown wide, biting her lip as she undoes another. Just barely a half-second passes before her head dips, and those perfect lips are pressing wet and open-mouthed against the base of his throat. “Yes, Jem-” He hisses.

His hand moves from her temple to tangle in her hair, holding her in place as he bucks against her jeans again, dragging out wanton sounds from far down in her belly, coiling right in her core - She doesn’t know how long she can keep this up before she implodes, or burns up, or just dies from the muchness of it all.

Jemma’s hands are struggling with Fitz’s shirt. Angry noises mingle with lust, so he leans back, and in one smooth motion, pulls them both over his head - collared shirt and jumper, discarded on the floor as he watches her eyes taking him in.

Fitz has never felt so objectified before, as her ember eyes burn a path from his slim waist up to his pectorals. He has never felt so singular in purpose as he does now, watching her take him in hungrily, his own hands travelling up the sides of her flimsy, sheer blouse to cup her breasts. "My turn," the words rumble out of his chest and tunnel through her, sending shivers tinkling up her spine. His thumbs brush against her nipples through the thin fabric separating their skin, and she gasps sharply at the sensation.

His face is all wonder, mouth parted, eyes wide, as he tests the movement again. Jemma involuntarily presses her breasts full into his palms, and a satisfied grin pulls his lips wide. Fitz can't stop himself, leaning forward, planting a hot, moist kiss against the swell of her breast through the sheer of her blouse. It burns against Jemma's skin like a brand. Her nails dig sharp into the freckles at his shoulder at this touch - and she can't help but think how right it is - that what she feels, he feels too. Its always been their way.

His face is determined, his brow furrowed, mouth set, as his fingers unhook her buttons, one by one, slowly and carefully. His hands don't shake, not once, but he relishes the agonizingly reveal, the pale swathes of flesh that flush wherever his finger-tips touch.

Jemma leans forward, trying to find his lips to kiss, but he smirks and evades them, just millimeters away, hands seizing hers as she tries in vain to pull him closer. 'Patience, Simmons," he teases.

She settles for running her hands nervously along the breadth of his shoulders, tracing the freckles down the length of his arms, tucking her head down, tilting away.

Seeing the way he looks at her - the way he memorizes every inch, like she is some piece of art, like a song he's never heard, some elegant design of Asgardian engineering, a galaxy far off made, suddenly, close - like she is something spun from stars and dark matter, like she is something dangerous and altogether beautiful, paralyzes her. Seeing herself through his eyes is impossibly terrifying.

"You're the most beautiful thing," Fitz says. His voice is nothing more than a whisper, but it is so sure. He slides the material down her shoulders, letting it fall in a pool around her, and tenderly, takes her face, still looking nervously away, in his hands. "Don't. Don't do that - don't hide from me." He pleads. "I know you, Jem.  Your mind, your heart - I know you like the back of my hand - there's nothing you could show me that could scare me away. It's true." His hands are hot and present at the back of her neck, anchoring her here.  

Fitz looks deeply into her eyes, and says, "So really, you're doomed to have me hanging about forever." He quirks a grin, and she laughs in relief, lovingly carding her hand through his hair, fingers trailing down his temple and cheek.

Jemma just gazes at his open face, the way his truth is written so plainly, so uncomplicatedly. She smiles, and it is inexplicably sad. "What if you wake up one day, and realize i'm not as worthy of that pedestal as you think? I have flaws Fitz -"

"You have an annoying fondness for comparing yourself to Hermione Granger, for instance. And insisting that you’d be the Doctor, and that I’d simply be a companion, which is completely false. You never clean up after yourself in the lab. Sometimes when you sleep, you drool. You never -" He kids, trying to lighten the mood, trying to pull her back to him.

"I'm not perfect. I make so many mistakes - I nearly ruined us - I let you get hurt," she chokes out, her thumb brushing against his bottom lip. She kisses his eyelids gently, and he can sense her tears start. He shifts his hands to brush them away before they can fall, and shushes her gently.

“No, no, I made that choice,” He insists.

“But then I left - I should never have - _I’ll never forgive myself_ -” Why she keeps talking, she doesn’t know. These words just keep overflowing - She can’t seem to stop them. She never talks like this - she’s never so - open, so intimate, so vulnerable with herself. Her heart is pounding in her chest and her words are echoing in the soundless room, and her reflection is mirrored in his eyes.

Fitz just shakes his head, his mouth frowning in disagreement. His eyes are growing red and glassy as he softly pets the side of her face, his fingers combing through the curling strands of her hair. He says nothing. He knows what it feels like to need to spill words like tears. He wishes he could have half of her bravery, and then decides, in that moment, to be braver, for her. She deserves that at least.

“It was like twisting a knife - and it scared me, Hydra - being away from you, but I don’t know what was worse, that or the fact that I was making it worse by being around you. You kept trying so hard and beating yourself up so much for not doing better, and I couldn’t - I didn’t have it in me, to let you suffer so much -” A sob tears through her, and Fitz clutches her tight, making soothing noises, running his warm, long-fingered hands up and down her back.

“When I first came back, I half-wished I’d been burned, that Bobbi hadn’t been there. It hurt just as bad - seeing how far you were from me. How much I hurt you by leaving - at least then I’d be able to see some damage, feel some physical pain, for all it tore my heart out. I couldn’t fix it. I can’t ever fix it. I’m so, _so_ sorry. I love you so much, and I hurt you, and I’ll never, _ever_ forgive myself for that.”

She cries into his shoulder, and he lets her. He lets her weep until her shoulders still, and her breathing grows steady.

Fitz moves back, taking her face in the palms of his hands, and with his thumbs, brushes the tears from her lashes. Her honey-brown eyes shine gold with emotion - Her features so vulnerable and open and trepidatious - her lower lip trembles, waiting for the axe to fall, waiting for him to pack it all up and take it away at that admission, to tell her _‘well in that case, then no, you’re not worth it. You left. You gave up on me, and you don’t deserve my love.’_

Instead, he presses his forehead to hers, and closes his eyes, a stray tear falling down his cheek, onto his lips, as he angles her head carefully. His kiss is slow but ardent, and full of gratitude and forgiveness, and  it makes her feel pure and whole. It mends something in her, something she hadn’t known was broken. But like molten gold, how he kisses her, tear-salted and heart-sweet, it fills in the faults.

It feels like baptism, this kiss, like they’re being unmade underneath each others lips and hands and tongues, and being remade in the breath that passes between them. Jemma brings both hands to his face, and they are a mirror image of each other, fingers molding features, mouths sighing benedictions, shuddering like candleflame.

When they stutter apart, too full up of each other, too bursting with newness, Fitz still holds her face in his hands. He stares into her, his eyes the blue of rivers and streams and the ocean that changed them both, and he says, “There’s nothing to forgive, Jem. Not a thing, not ever. I couldn’t see past my problems - I didn’t realize how much it hurt you - I thought…” He took a deep breath, and finally, finally, said the words. “ _I love you, Jemma_. I love you so much it scares me sometimes. I didn’t think you felt the same - I didn’t see it for what it was.”

He kisses her again, and she sinks into his lips and against the press of his body. It’s tidal, this - the thing between them, it keeps pulling them back together. “And you came back to me, Jem. That’s what matters,” He murmurs against her lips, slanting an affectionate kiss against the side of her mouth.

“Always.” She slides her tongue against his, immersing herself in him, in this forgiveness, in the feel of his arms and the press of his hands, and says again, fiercely, “Always, Leopold Fitz. You’re my home.” Jemma tucks her cheek into his collarbone, just under his chin, and hugs him tightly.

They sit there like that for a long while, wrapped in each other, sharing heat and air and nearness until goose-pimples bump up along the skin of Jemma’s arm, and rapidly, she thinks, _now I’ve done it. Its done now, the window’s closed._

“I’ve gone and ruined the moment, haven’t I? Me and my big mouth,” She whines, pulling back to flop herself out on the bed, running a hand through her hair.

Fitz follows suit, a half-smile quirking across his mouth as he raises an eyebrow at her.

“I was really looking forward to sex.” She admitted, casting a wayward glance at Fitz, who’s smile grows bigger and more playful the longer she looks at him. A heated blush pans across her cheeks as she watches him drag his heated gaze from her calves, over her hips, across her navel, to meditate upon the rise and fall of her breasts, before, finally, landing back at her eyes.

“More’s the pity,” He intones, slowly walking his fingers over to her waist. He slings his fingers through a belt-loop. “Moment-ruiner.” His face splits into a wide grin as he makes a move to sit up.

Jemma gasps in shock and feigned-betrayal, slapping at his forearm, “Leopold Fitz! If you _even think_ of leaving this bed, _I swear to god_ ,” She begins.

“Ooh, you’ll what, Simmons?” He asks, his brogue rough as burrs, using his hold on her belt-loop to pull her a foot nearer to where he lays, propped up on an elbow, “I want to hear this. I always figured you’d be just as bossy in bed as in the lab,” He muses, dragging her body, inch by inch, inexorably closer, until they’re connected at the hip.

“I am not bossy!” She declares with a faint slap at his chest. It’s more of an excuse to run her hand against the planes of his chest, if she’s honest. He sucks in a heady breath as her fingers trace the angles on his abdomen, brushing against the waistband of his jeans, and suddenly, Fitz feels competitive.

His hand ambles along her hip, down the curve of her ass to slowly pull her thigh up over his.“I’m not,” She insists. “I’m ju- _u_ st - _ooh!_ ” He surges forward, pressing against her, his chest kneading her breasts as his hand grips at her waist, pulling her hard against him, nipping at the juncture of her throat and shoulder. Her whole body quivers under his teeth, and he files away this hypothesis for later, as she blurts out, “D-don’t interrupt w-wi-iiith that!”

 _Nevermind later_ , he thinks.

Jemma catches her lip between her teeth as Fitz drags his teeth along the sensitive skin of her collarbone, and bites, laving the mark that rises with the flat of his tongue, pressing soft, tender kisses to it. She trembles under his ministrations, her nails scratching against his spine at the intensity of it all.

“See? Bossy,” He murmurs into the swell of her breast as he moves down her body. One of Jemma’s hands comes to clutch at his curls. He grins like Huck Finn, like it’s spring and he’s just stolen a pie from the window sill - like everything is perfect and blue and could stretch on into forever.

Fitz pulls the satin of her bra cup down under her breast, baring it fully. He puffs out a breath against her, watching as her back arches, her eyes falling closed and her mouth opening. She inhales shallowly as her nipple puckers in the chill air, and he watches her other hand dig into the comforter as his fingers come up to brush the soft underside of her breast. His touch is tentative at first, growing more confident as he palms it’s weight, pinching the nipple between his thumb and fore-finger experimentally. Jemma hisses, and he flicks his tongue out against it, listening to her keen.

He kisses the abused flesh, wet and messy, his tongue swirling around the reddened nub, pulling it into his mouth. Jemma can’t help the way she presses into him, when his tongue does that, when his hands are hot and splayed along the curve of her back, mere inches from where she wants them, just below the waistband of her jeans, against her panties. _No_ , she decides - _inside them_. She wants to feel his hands on her. Needs it - needs it like she needs air, and suddenly, she’s whining high in her throat, arching into his mouth even more, reaching behind her, pushing his hands under the waistband of her panties.

His mouth moves off her breast with a slight pop of suction, and she stutters a gasp at the release. His eyes are surprised and questioning, and his hands are much too gentlemanly for her to handle. “Jem? You sure?” He asks.

She groans in sexual frustration, undulating her hips against his hardness. Involuntarily, his fingers dig into the supple skin of her bum, pulling her against him. “Yes, Fitz,” She moans against his mouth, pulling him up to slant a needy kiss against her lips.

They kiss like this, urgent and messy, full of clashing lips and bruising fingers, as if they could make up, in small moments, all the wasted years when their mouths didn’t meet, where their hands didn’t touch, where they didn’t quaver in each other’s arms.

Her bra straps fall, discarded around her shoulders, as Fitz, ever the genius, undoes the clasp mechanism on the first try, tugging it off of her body and turning his attention back to her breasts, pupils wide and dark like she were some drug beneath him. His mouth returns to her, nipping and licking and sucking, hands kneading, thumbs flicking, like he needs her in his bloodstream and under his tongue and in his veins.

Jemma is all feeling beneath him, and it’s almost too much - She grasps him by the hair and under his arm, dragging him back to her. His lips are calamitous, slanting her mouth open as his tongue tangles with hers, pulling back just a bit to nip at her bottom lip, and then soothing it with a tiny swipe of his tongue.

There are chaste kisses as their bodies meld, sinking into one another, lips parting naturally, as they press their tongues together. She pulls away, and he leans for her, desperate for her lips. Instead, she grins, and drags the tip of her nose against his jaw as he groans in bereavement.

Jemma  kisses a trail to the dip of Fitz’s throat, and licks. Fitz tastes like salt, like the tang of metal and grease, and faintly, of citrus - he tastes like bike-riding through the countryside, like skinned knees and pavement and yellow summers, and she can’t get enough, dragging the softness of her tongue against the length of his collarbone. At the same time, her hand has been moving lower, splayed out across Fitz’s abdomen, sliding, in tiny, circling, agonizing movements, into the waistband of his boxers.

Her nails are sharp against the sensitive skin there, and he hitches his breath through his teeth, shivering shamefully. He squeezes his eyes shut, and her hand stills. When he lifts his eyes open, puppy-dog wide, to see her smiling up at him wickedly, he lets out an embarrassingly desperate sound.

She giggles - _giggles!_ \-  and her kitten tongue flicks out against her lips as she maintains eye-contact. Jemma’s hand descends further, brushing against the head of his cock, as he sucks a breath inward, his hips stuttering, instinctually, against her open palm. He is thick and rather long, and she can feel the protruding vein of the underside against her thumb.

Her other hand works at his zipper, undoing his jeans and palming his testes through the fabric of his boxer-briefs for a moment before pulling them down, and freeing his length.

Frantically, he tugs his jeans and pants down his legs, getting them tangled around his knees, before finally kicking them off in one awkward movement.

Jemma laughs, squeezing his cock lightly as she does so, and presses an affectionate kiss to his heart-spot. “You’re such a wanker,” She snorts into his chest.

“Technically Simmons,  in this situation, the wanker would be you,” he says pointedly, quirking an eyebrow between her hand and her face, suggestively, squeezing the cheek of her ass in his hand. Her laughter is long and sustained and filled with mirth.

Fitz should feel perturbed, but he’s not - it’s been too long since she laughed like that, since her breath wheezed out her chest, since she looked happy, truly, honestly happy. That it was him that made it happen, well, it swelled his heart up a bit. He didn’t think he could love her more than he did now, snorting loudly against his chest, one hand on his cock, all over a rather juvenile wank joke.

He pretends to feel affronted. “Hey, hey now! I will have you know this is serious business! There’s no laughing in bed, Simmons!” He declares between quick, affectionate kisses.

This just sets her off again into another fit of chortles.

“Well you just try and see how graceful-like you are, trying to take your trousers off when I’ve my hands in your pants,” He grumbles, slapping her bottom lightly in mock-punishment.

Her eyes flick open and she squeezes him lightly, making his breath catch. The sunspots in her eyes are dazzling and playful and full of excitement. “Is that a threat?”

He growls low and feral in his throat as her hand pumps him slowly, her thumb swiping briefly over the tip of his cock, brushing down against his glans as she twists her palm on the downstroke. His mouth ensnares hers, his tongue breaching, plundering, sending waves of desire to pool in her belly.

“Not a threat, just a promise,” His grin is wicked and his eyes are devastating, so close to her own.

Jemma discovers that she likes to watch his face as she works him in her hand - likes to watch the play of lust and longing across his features, bowing his mouth, dilating his pupils, hollowing his cheeks as he begins to thrust into her hands.

His breathing is shallow, catching every few seconds, and he squeezes his eyes shut, the corners crinkling as he bites his cheek, trying to slow the steady build that tightens his muscles with each heavy, rhythmic stroke. The pressure builds to a high note, tremulous and involuntarily as his thighs begin to shake - Jemma’s nails are brushing his scrotum, and he twitches in her hand -

He seizes her wrists, breathing hard, stilling her hands. “Jem -”

“But -” Her eyes are confused.

“I’m too close,” he pants, moving her hands gently off him.

He splays his fingers along her stomach, and then moves them, sensually, lower, down under the waistband of her jeans, against the soft cotton of her panties, where she is already wet through. “And I’d rather come inside you than in your hand,” He admits quietly.

She gasps at the feeling of his fingers against her wetness, fisting her hands into the covers beside her, trying not to lift her hips, trying not to seek that delectable pressure.

She feels so wanton under his grasp, eager for any touch he grants. There’s something so indecorous about this, his fingers stroking so very gently over her centre, his hand shoved down the front of her jeans. He moves to lay half on top of her, trapping her arm under him, so all she can do is run her fingers through his hair at the nape of his neck as his hand grows bolder.

His mouth drops hot, wet, messy kisses along the column of her throat, and she arches her spine, begging him wordlessly to pay attention to her lonely nipples. He drags his fingertips out from the confines of her trousers to thumb roughly against the hardened nub, evoking high, whining noises from Jemma; from his absence at the apex of her thighs, or his sudden presence at her breasts, she couldn't say.

He nuzzles into her cleavage, his fingers soft and playful along the sensitive curve, as he teasingly abandons her nipples. “Fitz!” She whines, rolling on her side to slap at his muscle of his shoulder - only she forgets that plan when he kisses the riverbed dip between her breasts. His tongue darts out, absorbing a droplet of sweat that had run into the valley of her sternum. Instead, her fingers sink into the muscles that work beneath them, his hand travelling from her breast, across her ribs, to her spine, as her pulls the length of her back into a half-moon.

Fitz lips brush soft and flickering up to the cliff peak of her right nipple, and there he hovers, his eyes meeting hers. Jemma is  breathing in short, hitched breaths and her eyes shine. She is so trusting in his embrace, the way her bones sink around the buttress of his arms, bowing supine for him, her guileless hands tracing the angles of his face. Her thumb strokes the pucker of his bottom lip, travelling velvet over his cheekbone, feather-soft against his eyelashes. She smiles a tiny, intimate smile, and mouths softly, as if to herself, in half-astonishment, half-affection, “ _Mine_.”

“ _Yours_ ,” He fondly agrees, his strawberry mouth lowering, finally, nursing that tiny pebble into a peak of flesh. He pulls her up, defying gravity, the skin of her breast pulled taut and held tight by teeth and lips and tongue, until he throbs between his legs, listening to her hitched, uncontrolled breaths, the high keens that are escaping her mouth as she throws an arm over her eyes, as if to hide from her shamefully wanton display of sensuality.

When he releases her, she sighs, bereft, sinking boneless into the mattress. He is desperate to watch her come undone under his mouth - He’s been desperate for it a year past, fantasizing about what she tastes like, how she’ll writhe, how his buttoned-up, proper, good girl lab partner would unravel so prettily. How he’d lick and kiss and swipe, just so.

His mouth is a river that meanders down the slope of her ribs, the curve of her belly, dragging hot desire to pool like a kettle lake low in her abdomen, just above her fly, where his mouth stills.  

His hands aren’t shaking any more. Haven’t been for a while, Jemma notes, somewhere in the back of her mind, watching him unbutton her jeans and pull down her zipper. Psychosomatic, probably, she diagnoses, treatment ideas bubbling, only to be forcefully forgotten when she suddenly gasps in shock and surprise, feeling Fitz’s warm lips against the moist fabric of her cotton panties, and blushes a deep red. Her hands pull at the side of his face, half in his hair, “Fitz! What -  I just - _really_?”

He sits up, blinking, bewildered, “Well, yeah, I was thinking…” He trails off, hooking his fingers in the waistband of her jeans, inside her panties, dragging them slowly down her hips, his cock twitching to watch the slow reveal.

“But - most don’t like…” Jemma’s protestation loses steam as she watches Fitz’s mouth drop open, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he gulps, staring at the bare swaths of flesh that become exposed with each tug of his hands.

“ _I_ do.” He says, concentration unbroken, his knuckles brushing her thighs, leaving trembling trails of tipped gooseflesh in their wake. “Been thinking about this. For a while."

There is a pulse in her core at his admission, and it echoes, tingling in ripples out to her fingertips.

He tosses her clothes aside, tenderly stroking her bare right leg from the sole of her foot to the outside swell of her thigh, his face all adoration. He flicks his eyes to her face, where she is biting her lip, bruising it white with need, and asks in a concern-laden tone, “Is that alright?” He tilts his head, nuzzling her thigh, his gaze fixed on her, watching her rapid nod.

She’s too afraid to speak, too afraid of the want that would sing so plain across her vocal chords, so desperate and needy and pleading. He grins, teeth flashing white.

Fitz winds his arm under her knee, grasping her thigh as he presses his mouth to the juncture, a tender kiss blossoming. His other hand goes to rest on her other knee, opening her with infinite care - never too fast, as if waiting for her to shy away. Her skin sparks where he touches her, like pop-rocks and coke bursting.

His left hand thumbs strong, comforting circles into the skin of her thigh as it descends. His right hand pets her hip. His mouth presses kisses like flowers to her inner thigh, and jemma knows, from now on, whenever she closes her legs together, like the pages of a book, they will ghost across the memory of this.

A shiver trills up her spine - Fitz is tonguing the crease of her inner thigh - he is so close and she is so close to begging him. His thumb strokes along her seam, dipping lower and lower with every pass, until it travels against the slickness inside. Jemma's hips stumble forward, nails digging into the back of Fitz's neck, as she whimpers needfully.

His breath puffs hot and tortuous against her core as he opens her. To Jemma, his fingers are everywhere but where she needs them, running electric over her folds. His thumb circles wide around the sensitive bundle of nerves, making her quake, making her moan in succession, tiny, high-pitched cries she cuts off - the heel of her left hand tight to her mouth.

The trembling fingers of Jemma's right hand clutch tight at his curls as in unison, he plunges two fingers inside her and flicks the tip of his tongue against her clit.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" She cries as he pumps his fingers in and out, building up pressure and speed, the pads of his fingertips dragging along that perfect spot inside.

His thumb circling her clit is joined by his swirling tongue, and it's as if all of her awareness is being drawn, mounting, inward, a quaking, molten epicenter.

Her hips have started to lift off the bed rhythmically, pressing herself against Fitz's tongue, driving herself onto his fingers, meeting him thrust for thrust. It's the most erotic thing Fitz has ever seen.

He grips her hip, supporting her thrusts, watching the shifting shadows of her breasts, the path of pink flushing along the outstretched column of her throat. Her whole body shudders in pulses around him.

He loves the taste of her, like rain on the coast. She’s like an estuary on his tongue, he thinks, lapping at her folds.

She begins to beg. " _Oh please, oh, yes, oh pllleeease -_ "

Leo Fitz has never been able to say no to Jemma Simmons. Now’s not the time to start.

He sucks that tiny, swollen bundle into his mouth, lathing it with the flat of his tongue, and begins to hum. He curls his fingers and quickens his pace, watching her coil taut like a spring. Her muscles clench in velvet spasms inside her, and he is in awe, drinking in the sight of her coming apart beneath him, writhing and rocking and crying out his name over and over.

Her hips sway as she drops slowly back into orbit. Fitz’s pace slows, his tongue retreats, and he lifts his mouth away, fingers still stroking inside her as she flutters wanly around him, all spun out.

He moves up beside her, his free hand supporting her waist, pulling her to him, as he slows, removing his fingers from her, and holding her tight to his chest as she shudders through the aftershocks. “There’s my good girl,” He croons, pressing kisses to her temple as she curls towards him. She nods, hazily, words too far away in her brain.

"...Yours," she agrees finally, when she can form words again.

She smears a hot kiss against the side of his mouth when she leans over him, straddling,  her hand at the bedside table. Pressing a silver packet into his hands, Jemma grips his chin and jaw, tilting his face up to where hers hovers above.

“I love your mouth,” She declares. Her lips crash onto his possessively. She can taste herself on his tongue as their bodies roll. He sits up, gasping, ripping open the packet as he drinks in the sight of her, hair tumbling like some mussed halo against the pillows, lips swollen from his kisses, half-open and watching his hand slide the condom down his length. Her knees are drawn up, and they lean together, like they’re too drunk from all of this to support themselves, and god, he could just lose himself between those thighs, he thinks, crawling forwards, hands running electric up her calves, pulling those knees apart, and dipping his head down. One last swipe with his tongue at the juncture of her thighs, and she shivers so deliciously.

He moves up her body, rocking his hips just so, the tip of his cock sliding against her clit in tiny starbursts. She writhes beneath him, her hands sweeping up his back, “Please, Leo, I need you,”

It’s the way she asks - so bloody polite, so bloody cute, like he’d say no if she didn’t mind those perfect P’s and Q’s, and he snickers as he kisses her earlobe, grinning against the soft skin of her throat.

His mouth is hot and wet and amazing - _god, that mouth,_ who would have known how talented he’d be with it? Hands, she’d guessed, but his mouth? She could self-immolate from the way it burns, lighting her veins all on fire and - _Oh!_ There’s nothing she wants more than to feel him, to be full up with him, and the way he teases - _oh! again_ -

“ _Oh! Please, please, please Fitz_ ,” She whimpers, her fingers clinging indecorously to his bicep, one hand gripped against his perfect ass, and he’s grinning down at her, watching her bite her lip to keep from begging desperately.

She lifts her head from the pillow, smothering his lips in kisses, trying to entice him to give her what she’s trying so hard not to beg for, but he knows her game, knows how to push her to the edge, to rile her up.

He presses just the tip of himself inside her, and it’s murder to stop here, it’s killing him to roll his hips back against her cries, to push her hip down into the bed with his hand, holding her still, when all he wants to do is ravage her, to make her moan and wail and shudder.

But god, he loves to hear her say please. Adores that cute little proper english accent asking him so very politely - “Say it again, Jem - ask for it, just one more time,”He drops a searing kiss to her mouth, his tongue delving, making promises.

She moans balefully. His palm burns against her hipbone, and sometimes she hates him, but the way he’s looking at her, licking his lips and smirking so devilishly, goading her, it makes her want him so much more. “You - inside me. Please - _don’t make me beg_ -”

Her last word is swallowed in a tumultuous kiss as he surges forward, sliding into her.

Jemma’s shocked breathless as her body tenses around him - he stills inside her, waiting for her to adjust, and she’s glad of it, whimpering under his mouth. His girth is almost too much, they are so tight together, that every tiny movement trills a delicious note of friction and pain.

“ _Oh yess, oh Jem, yesss_ ,” He breathes hot against the shell of her ear, settling the last few inches inside her, so they are flush together for a long, intimate moment, staring wide-open into each others eyes, before Fitz rolls his hips away.

Jemma gasps, bereft, before he rocks back into her, her spine arching in answer. They slide and arch, trying to find their rhythm, as their flesh begins to slick with sweat.

Like the tides, their bodies pull and crash together. Jemma's all sensitized, pressurized, like she could become a diamond under Fitz's careening weight, the press of his palms, his mining cock, driving in and out of her.

Their hipbones knock together, and she can feel him swell inside her, pulling against that perfect spot. "Fitz! Right -"

" _There_ ," he groans deeply, gripping her thigh, pushing it up, leveraging himself closer - deepening the angle, triangulating that spear of pleasure-pain with the next powerful thrust.

He loves the way her heel digs, shudderingly, into the back of his thigh, how her nipples press into his chest with every forward movement, how hot and wet and tight she feels around him -

" _Yes_ ," He grunts, driving into her as her nails press into his buttocks, urging him harder and deeper as she undulates to meet him. “ _Jesus Christ, Jem_ ,”

Jemma thinks that Fitz must be in her head, somehow, to know what she needs and just how to give it - she urges 'harder', but halfway through, the word turns into a wail, Fitz's glutes clenching under her hand with the strength of his thrust.

“ _Ha -Aaahhhhh_!” She wails, her lips smeared against the side of his throat. Fitz doesn't think he can last for long like this - the way she writhes beneath him, giving into something instinctual, shedding the last of her propriety with a high, keening moan - _oh god, it just keeps going_ \- its the most erotic sound he’s ever heard, he thinks, and he’s the genesis of it, his cock working inside her, _his cock giving her pleasure_ \- and Jesus Christ, he thinks he might be able to make her come again, the way she’s shuddering, if he can just last a little longer - Biting his lip, he plunges deep inside her, and rolls, so she’s on top.

Jemma’s eyes are bright as amber, her pupils wide, her mouth hollowing out in pleasure as she orients herself, bearing down through her pelvis, slowly sinking down onto him, “ _Aaahh_ …” She moans, throwing her head back and canting her hips forward, her clit catching as she grinds down hard against him.

She’s never been so vocal before - so full up of whimpers and screams and breathy, high moans - she’s convinced she sounds, and looks, like something from a porno, the way she moves herself against him, palms to his chest, capturing his lips in a possessive kiss as he rocks up hard into her - her breath hitching in time to his thrusts.

She doesn’t though. To Fitz, from below, watching her pendulous breasts shift with every deep and tortuous roll of her hips, the light through the high window gleaming against the swaying line of her body, filtering through the tangled aureole of her hair, she looks like art. To Fitz, she looks like the works he studied to improve his drafting, like something da vinci would sketch. To Fitz, Jemma is high renaissance, something painted by the masters, all chiaro-scuro, all hazy shadows and light.

The thought slips away, forgotten as she rides him, driving both of them to a panting, moaning, dangerous fever-pitch. Fitz is so close, every breath escaping in needy gasps and groans. Jemma sits up, grinding her hips in a fast, undulating rhythm, and he can’t touch her enough, can’t feel her sweat-slicked skin enough, needs more of her, even as he drinks in the vision of her, tossing her hair back, her breasts peaked and her back an amazing half-moon, supporting herself by pressing a palm flat to his thigh as he pumps in and out of her.

Jemma feels her muscles grow taut and shuddering, waves of them spill into each other - she can feel Fitz straining inside her, and beneath her, feel his fingertips dig into the curve of her ass, pulling her onto the driving length of his cock. She’s so close, and she knows he’s almost there too. Her hand winds around his bicep, and she pulls.

Her hand is insistent on Fitz’s arm, urging him closer, pulling him up to her mouth, as they shift, still moving together, still meeting hip-to-hip. Jemma is straddling his lap, drawing her fingers up against the nape of his neck to clutch at his wild curls, his cock shifting inside her as his tongue flickers against her own, and his length is hitting even deeper, in this new position, as they rock together.

He can feel the muscles in his forearm straining, pushing his hand down into the bed as he pistons upwards. “Just a little -”

“ _More!_ ” Jemma exclaims as he rolls her again, driving her bodily into the bed cushions with each powerful, momentous thrust. His hand slips between them, thumbing her clit, as he feels himself draw tight, bearing down hard into her, his thighs shaking, as he tightens - spinning out into a wide trajectory of sheer bliss, his muscles seizing inside her and around her - his thumb rubbing her clit furiously to orgasm as she lifts, surging up, her voice ringing out beside his.

Her second orgasm has been slow to build, but once Fitz’s thumb grazes her clit, it rings out like a tuning fork, intensifying and shattering and catastrophic - sending her higher than her first, way out - one long, raw nerve ending trapped under the pulsations that are tearing through him. Her hips rock against him, milking the last of his orgasm as he collapses on top of her, his welcome weight pinning her, breathing hard, into the bed.

Jemma drags her palms from the base of his thighs, against his pert, perfect ass, along the radiant warmth of his back, and back down. She strokes him like that for a while, admiring the feel of his smooth, wiry frame, the heaviness of his weight, the scent of him filling her nose. He coils tighter around her, and she sighs deeply and contentedly.

Jemma’s fingers card through his curls. They’re sweaty at the roots from exertion, and she can’t help the wide, satisfied grin that forms, thinking of the cause. She turns her head to catch the side of his face where it’s dropped between her neck and shoulder, and peppers sloppy, affectionate, exhausted kisses against his jaw and behind his ear.

Fitz’s cock twitches, still inside of her, growing soft, as he groans against her skin, “You’ll be the death of me, woman,” He nips her gently on the shoulder, before kissing it better.

Jemma laughs loudly and happily into his grinning mouth as they kiss again. It is familiar, and tired, and sloppy - teeth clashing, giggles snorting around tongues,their lips fondly finding each other through it all.

“You make the most adorable cum-face,” She giggles, pressing the heel of her hand into her eyes as her giggles turn to chortles, and then full on belly-laughs, “Its the cutest thing - like a puppy caught weeing on the rug!”

“Me? No!” He insists, his arms wreathing around her waist to pull her beneath the covers with him, “No! My cum-face is manly! And sexy! You can’t tell a man he’s got a puppy cum-face, Simmons!”

She snorts, throws away the condom, and slots herself in against him. She adjusts his hand to hold her breast and play thoughtlessly with her nipple. She pets down from his low back, against the dimples of his ass, and pulls him flush against her, while his other arm delves between her thighs, and she hums in approval, her head falling back against his shoulder.

“I like puppies,” She says, sleepily. “In fact, I love them. And that’s not to say the rest of your exertions weren’t exceedingly masculine,”

“Oh really?” he growls into her neck, making her giggle again, his hand between her thighs stroking slowly, making her shudder.

“Really,” she breathes, “You were lovely,”

Fitz removes the hand from her thighs and teasingly slaps her hip, “Aye, you can’t say a man was lovely when he’s just been inside you! Where did you learn your sex etiquette? I’m going to have to send whoever told you that a stern letter of disapproval,”

“ _Oooh,_ Stern Fitz. Yes please,” Jemma grins. “Besides, you were lovely - it was an honest assessment!” She turns to face him, pulling his head down for a kiss, “Lovely and sexy and amazing. And a little bit dominant - quite beastly at times,” She muses, running her hand down his thighs, “Which I quite liked. Hoped you would be.”

“I’m a bad man. A very sexy, very manly, brilliant, bad, bad man,” He says, nuzzling down further under the covers, his eyes, falling closed as he listens to her heartbeat. “Say it, you minx,”

Jemma snorts again. “Oh Fitz. You gorgeous fool.” She says back, kissing him soundly, “You very sexy, very manly, very brilliant, lovely, wonderful, very good man.”

“Well fine, I suppose that’ll do. You English Harpy.”

“Scotch Codger.”

“Wanker.”

“Fanny-frencher,”

It went on like this until they devolved into a fit of exhausted laughter, falling asleep half-way through a tickle-war under the blankets.

* * *

_Epilogue, or Never Bet Against May When the Game Is Rigged_

And that was how Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons moved in together, under the watchful, and increasingly scandalized eye of the painting of Agent Peggy Carter. In the months to come, Fitz would coin her ‘Saint Peggy, Patron Saint of Horny and Very Experimental Scientists’ and then be forced to kiss away Jemma’s affronted expression.

Not long after this picture of post-coital bliss, Agent May walked down the hall to her own bunk, hearing the sound of hushed giggles and moans from Simmon’s quarters. She smiled a small, pleased smile, and pocketed an undisclosed sum of wadded up bills.

It was so obvious - and of course, she’d take them for all they were worth. In the end, she’d offered Billy a handshake, trying to be moderately sportsmanlike, even if the whole way through, it was rigged. The outcome was set.

The candle. Drunken sugar-scrawls, discarded, half-full tea-cups, wrinkled clothes, longing looks, hands like the opposite poles of magnets. They were everywhere, these little moments, like pearls on a string, like words on a page, like little prayers all offered up one by one. Just tiny altars, everywhere you looked.

 


End file.
